


i guess that's love

by stitchingatthecircuitboard



Series: can't pretend [1]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Non-Linear Narrative, POV Second Person, Rule 63, abuse of the second person, except for the cisgirl!bellamy of course and a couple invented scenes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-23
Updated: 2014-11-23
Packaged: 2018-02-26 18:33:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2662169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stitchingatthecircuitboard/pseuds/stitchingatthecircuitboard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are no siblings on the Ark. You must learn to be a sister from the stories left to you, and even then, they are little help. There are brothers everywhere, but no sisters. </p><p>That's alright. You're smart enough, and O likes you well enough, and your chest gets too warm and too tight sometimes when you hold her and she looks at you with those solemn dark eyes. You'll figure it out: you'll be as fast as Atalanta, as cruel as Diana, as calculating as Minerva and as brutal as Mars to keep her safe. </p><p>It won't be enough. It never is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i guess that's love

**Author's Note:**

> this happened because i thought "wouldn't it be great if bellamy blake were a queer lady" and riga said "share the feelings!" so. blame her for this.
> 
> yeah yeah, title's from tom odell's "can't pretend," how ORIGINAL, stitch, whATEVER.
> 
> spoilers through 205.

You are six years old when your mother sweats and screams behind a scrap of cloth, reaching into the bloody center of her to pull out a creature covered in what looks like slime, blood, the crucial inner mechanisms of the human body. "Your sister," your mother tells you, voice raw and ragged. 

"My sister?" you whisper. The child — can it really be a child, as you are? — blinks at you solemnly. Your mother smiles, hands her off to you. 

You think back to your books, the faded pictures of gods and emperors, tridents and laurel crowns; strong men, beautiful women. Sisters, treacherous or dead or lost to history's ravages. "Augustus had a sister," you offer: Octavia. The name slips down your tongue beautifully. Your mother nods. 

"Octavia," she agrees; then, "Bellamy?"

You look up. 

"Tell me what happens if anyone knows you have a sister."

You swallow. "They float you, and take her."

"That's right," Aurora says. She closes her eyes, leans back against the bunk. "Don't let her cry, Bella. She's your responsibility now. You have to protect her."

 

 

There are no siblings on the Ark. You must learn to be a sister from the stories left to you, and even then, they are little help. There are brothers everywhere, but no sisters. 

That's alright. You're smart enough, and O likes you well enough, and your chest gets too warm and too tight sometimes when you hold her and she looks at you with those solemn dark eyes. You'll figure it out: you'll be as fast as Atalanta, as cruel as Diana, as calculating as Minerva and as brutal as Mars to keep her safe. 

It won't be enough. It never is. 

 

 

Earth, when you reach it, enchants and entraps in equal measure. You have to protect Octavia; you have to stay alive. 

"Tell me what happens," your mother had said, you sixteen and wiry and bleeding where a boy had struck you, _dyke_ ugly on his lips, "if they find out."

"They float me," you’d said dully; as if there were another answer to that question. The Ark has dedicated itself to the survival of the human race. Reproduction is heavily monitored. All those capable of reproducing are required to do so. Citizens who do not contribute are not worth the resources invested in them. 

For a brief second, Shumway standing cold in front of you, you'd thought Earth could be your salvation too; that the unfeeling uniformity of the Ark might be gone on the Ground. 

Stranded with a hundred offenders, with more teenage boys than you ever wanted to see in one place, you realize how wrong you were. 

You keep your mouth shut. You protect Octavia. Those are the only things keeping you alive. 

 

 

The princess —

The princess is a complication. 

Not for the first time, you think how much easier everything would be if you were a man. 

 

 

On the Ground, you take action; you take command. As if you have a choice. You open the door; you make your sister the first human to set foot on Earth in ninety-seven years; you watch the hundred race through the green, exhilaration bright on their faces. You smile, all teeth and disaffected disdain; you bark orders without allowing for the possibility that you could be disobeyed, and don’t crumple with relief when people do as you say. You’ve always been charismatic, your mother told you that often enough, and so did Shumway when you were a cadet, but you’ve never used it so deliberately with so much to lose. 

Here, you think, you might finally be able to keep Octavia safe the way you were meant to; here, people will listen when you tell them to keep their hands off her, your little sister only seventeen and hungry in a way that spells only trouble. You try not to worry, and fail; it’s not as though there’s birth control on the ground, and it’s not as though men, boys, don’t take something they think is offered without asking. 

“Anyone touches her answers to me,” you tell Atom, iron in your voice, and he blinks, nods, stays quiet. 

You’re not surprised to catch them in the butterfly grove later. 

 

 

You still string him up, a warning to others. If Octavia wants to choose — well, you’ll cross that bridge when you come to it, but no one will touch her without welcome in the meantime.

 

 

Clarke — the princess, brave, sanctimonious, unsmiling princess, don’t think of her otherwise — the princess disapproves. You don’t care. You tell yourself that until you can’t deny it’s a lie, and then you tell yourself that she has allies, the Chancellor’s son, the Spacewalker, the boys who make the booze; even your sister. She’s a threat, you think, could undermine the fragile authority you’ve shored up since the dropship landed, but you still follow her when she tells you too, and you pull her from the pit, and you let her take food with the Ark’s wristband still gleaming on her wrist. 

She killed Atom, when you could not, sang him gently to death with your knife in his neck, his blood on her hands, your unblinking gaze on her. You owe her this much at least.

She watches you from across the fire, the Spacewalker pressed close to her side, the Chancellor’s son watching her. You turn back to the line of the hundred, the ninety-nine, and watch Murphy break off the wristbands. You know she watches you still.

 

 

Everyone watches her. Her bright hair, her honest eyes, her healing hands; how could they not?

You watch the perimeter, blood on your hands, guilt coiling rancid in your stomach, anger spilling over into your words, your choices, the princess, your sister, Charlotte —

They obey you. Of course they do.

 

 

The princess says, _“We_ make the rules,” tears bright and unshed, dirt and sweat caked over her face, her hands. 

Atom, you think, and Charlotte, and even Murphy, maybe; almost as much blood on her hands as yours.

(Charlotte, Atom, Wells — his father — )

“We banish him,” she says, holding your gaze, conviction growing every second. She stands taller. You want to kiss her. 

You don’t.

 

 

You always want to kiss her. You have always wanted to kiss her. You don’t.

You never do. You never will.

 

 

She looks at you like she knows. She doesn’t mention it, so you don’t either.

 

 

Spacewalker is poisoned, and your healer cannot heal. You’ll make the grounder talk. For all that he’s as good as useless — you haven’t forgiven him for what he did to Clarke, and of _course_ you know, of course you read it in her posture, the careful misdirection of her gaze — for all that he’s terrible, he’s still one of yours, still your responsibility, and so you cut the strap and the buckle from the dropship wall and prepare for more blood on your hands.

“Clarke,” you say roughly, a warning, a plea, an ache for absolution.

The princess squares her shoulders, lifts her chin. Her eyes are clear and hard, unwillingly ruthless.

“Do it,” she says.

As if you wouldn’t.

 

 

Jaha, Wells, _Charlotte,_ Atom, your mother, your sister, every child dead since you reached the ground, the three hundred you failed in the sky —

You bury it deep, and keep going. There is no other choice.

 

 

You wake with blood on your thighs and swear, has it been a month already, has it not been a year, a decade, a century since the ground — ?

Clarke, curled quiet in the medbay, wakes as you shuffle through the supplies, looking hopelessly for something to keep the evidence quiet.

“Box under the table,” she says, voice worn with weariness. “I boiled rags. Don’t throw them away when you’re done.”

“I _know,”_ you say irritably, not like anyone knows how to make cloth from the flora available to you, but you take the clean rags, and Clarke tactfully slips out of the medbay so you can clean yourself up. 

She comes back before you’ve quite finished, and you turn, watching the way her gaze flickers to the barely-there curve of your breast, the line of your waist. Your mouth goes dry.

“Willow tea,” she says unnecessarily, offering you the cup, “if — it’ll help with the cramps.”

Cramps have never been that bad for you, the way you know they are for some, for many, for Octavia, but you take the tea, let your fingers brush over hers. She holds your gaze unflinchingly, but her hand trembles.

“Thanks,” you say, the first to look away. She’s always been braver than you.

 

 

“Come on,” she says brusquely, the next day, Spacewalker staring sadly at her back. “I don’t feel like being around anyone I actually like.”

You deserve that, you think. You deserve a lot of pain.

 

 

Not for the first time, you’re glad of the training the Guard put you through, the strength in your body, how your ungainly coltish limbs grew into strides that can devour the terrain, the distance between you and your guilt and the absolution you don’t deserve; the way your hands know how to kill even if they don’t want to. You’re Atalanta after all, Diana in your hands, your posture, Mars in your rage. You should have been more careful.

 

 

 _Live,_ Jaha says coldly, cruelly, _suffer._

Dax sends Clarke sprawling back, breath wheezing unpleasantly, and you will kill him, you will —

 

 

Jaha, Wells, Charlotte, Atom, Murphy, Dax, your mother, your sister, the unnamed hundreds who fell like stars through the atmosphere —

 

 

“I forgive you,” Clarke says harshly, “you’re forgiven.”

 

 

“I need you,” she says, and you hold those words close to your heart, with the way her breath eases next to you, with your mother saying she’s your sister; protect her, with every memory you have of Octavia.

“Okay,” you say. “Okay.”

 

 

Octavia hates you. This is not new.

The grounder is gone. You are not surprised.

You are — tired of being pulled in two directions, of protecting your sister making protecting camp difficult, of having to put others before her, of needing to put her before others. You are tired of Clarke being sad, of Raven being angry, of Finn fucking _everything_ up, of Octavia fighting you on everything, of not being touched, of making hard choices that always end up hurting someone.

“It’s not easy,” you tell Clarke, “being in charge.” You mean to comfort her, remind her that she’s not alone, but she looks up at you closely, squeezes your hand.

“It is,” she says gently.

 

 

Raven kisses you, pushes you down against the bright orange blankets, and she smells like gunpowder, like fire.

“I’m tired of being sad,” she says. You understand, and help her pull off her tank.

“I’ve never been with anyone but Finn,” she says. You pull her closer, kiss her fiercely, thumb gently at the button of her jeans. She undoes the fastening, you push them down, lick her open, make her come with your mouth on her clit, your fingers in her cunt. 

She stares at the roof of the tent, chest heaving. You lie next to her, wet, aching, silent. You don’t ask her to return the favor, and she doesn’t offer. It was never about you, anyway. 

You don’t ask if it helped. You don’t need to. 

 

 

Clarke finds you after dinner one night, staring up at the moon from behind your tent. She sits down, pressing warm to your side even as the cold fogs your breath.

You wait; she says nothing, just brushes at the way your hair curls at your ears, the nape of your neck. It’s getting long, falling into your eyes, but you’re not quite sure you should cut it, winter coming as it is. Then again, a grounder could tangle their fingers in it, pull your head back and slit your throat.

“Stop,” Clarke says softly.

“Princess,” you murmur.

She leans her head against your shoulder with a sigh, reaches down and threads her fingers in yours. You wait; she says nothing.

Eventually, her breathing slows, deepens; she’s fallen asleep against you, this girl who was a threat who is the only person you think you can absolutely trust, who keeps you in more ways than you want to admit.

 

 

There is blood everywhere, and it was _you_ who let Murphy live, for all that Clarke fought for his life, for all that Finn gave him the knife — like you didn't know, like you don’t keep track of the weapons in camp — it was you who banished him, and you who didn’t argue when Clarke said “We heal him, we find out what he knows, and then we banish him again.”

There is blood in Clarke’s eyes, in Jones’ nose, everywhere in the dropship, and Octavia — Octavia is gone, because Clarke sent her to the grounder for a cure, and his blood is on your hands, too, his blood staining the love you have for Octavia, Clarke’s faith, Finn’s idealism, and the children, the _fucking children_ who keep dying on your watch because you were not fast enough, strong enough, brave enough, clever enough, brutal enough to protect them when you were needed.

You have never been enough. You see this now, with the rag tied across your face, with the bodies of the children who trusted you piling outside the dropship, with Octavia shouting at you and Clarke fainting and Raven falling and Murphy, Murphy —

You’re not surprised when Jasper discovers Murphy’s been killing them, or when Murphy screams for you, forces you to make your own noose and step into it. You deserve this, you think; you failed, and those who fail perish on Earth.

 

 

“Bellamy,” Clarke says. Her hand is on your arm. “Bellamy.”

_You’re forgiven, okay?_

 

 

_I need you._

 

 

You follow her to the bridge, you keep her safe back home. You follow her to the Exodus crash, you hold her when she falls to her knees. You watch, you wait, the rifle firm against your shoulder, your breast. You’d follow her anywhere, you think.

 

 

The grounder commander has other ideas. 

 

 

You hate Lincoln, but you send Octavia off with him, because it’s her choice, and he’s given up too much for her to hurt her, because he’d betrayed everything to save her, because he can help her and you can’t.

Some sister you are.

“O,” you croak, and she’s crying too, clinging to your neck the way she did when she was little, when you could fit her in your arms, when she was small enough for piggy-back rides around the apartment. “Octavia — ”

“I know, Bella,” she says thickly. Lincoln is tactfully looking away. 

“My life didn’t start ’til then,” you say, and hug her tightly, and let her go.

 

 

Your eyes are dry by the time you get back to camp.

 

 

The wall fails, the mines fail, the grounders upon them and the bullets are gone, but Octavia is safe, and Clarke has their people inside the dropship, and in this at least, in these few seconds, you can be enough.

You make it to the tunnels just in time, and don’t stop running until you think you’ll die.

 

 

Jaha, Wells, Charlotte, Atom, Dax, Lincoln, your mother, your sister, Jones, the three hundred fallen burning from the sky, the eighteen dead of disease and war and everything you could not guard against, the dozens more dead because you put guns in their hands and led them to war —

 

 

You find Finn after the smoke’s cleared. You’re not happy to see him. He’s not happy to see you, either.

 

 

“We need to find Clarke,” he snarls, and you shout _“I know.”_

Later, he tries to kiss you. You punch him, hard, give him a shiner that won’t soon fade, and shake out your hand. You wish Clarke were here. You miss her like a limb, like you miss Octavia, like you miss the days before the grounder war, before Lincoln, before the Ark came to Earth, before you fucked up with the radio and murdered three hundred people; like you miss your mother. 

_I need you,_ she’d said. 

_I need you more,_ you think. There are so many things you haven’t said. 

 

 

Another child dead because you were a coward, and you wind the rope around your body, wait for Roma and Murphy and Finn to hold you fast.

You can save someone, for a change. 

The girl lives, and so do you.

 

 

Octavia comes home, the home that is the two of you, and you can barely stop touching her, can barely let her out of your sight. She’s alive, she’s alive, and she’s home, with you, the only sisters the Ark ever saw.

 

 

Clarke —

 

 

“There’s something I thought I’d never see,” Octavia says unsteadily, and you sob — laugh — into Clarke’s hair, holding her tight, never letting her go, and how have you never done this, how have you never pressed her to you, or breathed her in, or felt her smile on your neck? 

She doesn’t let go, and you don’t, either.

**Author's Note:**

> will it continue? idk friend, ask me again when the season ends.


End file.
